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News from the world of Maths

Deciding who is to blame and who should pay for the financial crisis will be a hot topic at the G8 next week. Financial mathematics received a lot of bad press in the aftermath of the crunch and many believe that it was the popularity of mathematical models – often borrowed from physics — that put the financial system at risk. But now models borrowed from biology are helping us understand how this risk might be reduced.

At 9:59 pm (UK time) on Friday, May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, its closest approach for at least the next two centuries. And you can also catch a glimpse of the asteroid by the power of the internet.

Ben Allanach is a theoretical physicist who has worked at CERN and is interested in something called supersymmetry, which predicts particles that could be dark matter and might be produced in the collisions at CERN. Watch Ben explain it all in this TEDx lecture.

Every year the London Mathematical Society puts on a pair of popular lectures that are well worth seeing. This year's topics are maths in the court room and the mysteries of additive number theory. Find out more here.

Cosmologists gathered in the Netherlands last week to discuss a new view of the Universe. The Universe as seen by Planck was an international conference to discuss the recently released scientific results from the Planck satellite, including two particularly striking snapshots of the early Universe.

There are problems that are easy to solve in theory, but impossible to solve in practice. Intrigued? Then join us on a journey through the world of complexity, all the way to the famous P versus NP conjecture.